Friday, November 23, 2007

I love the Fox show "Kitchen Nightmares" with Chef Gordon Ramsay. Each week, Ramsay visits a disaster of a restaurant to find rotten food and even more rotten management.

The guy who is the worst, so far, is the owner/"chef" of a restaurant in Burbank CA called Sebastian's. You might as well put "owner" in quotes too, since his wife is bankrolling him and he's losing her money - quickly.

For a place that promoted pizzas, where were their culinary sins?

Nothing was made fresh, not the sauce, anything

The dough was purchased flash frozen (not fresh)

And the worst sin.... they had TWO wood burning ovens that they used... JUST FOR SHOW. Sebastian appeared to be microwaving pizzas. Blecch.

So Ramsay tried showing him how to do it properly, to make the dough and to use the oven, and even bought them a top-of-the-line industrial dough mixer. Ramsay even had them doing wood oven roasted chickens that looked great.

The restaurant staff was thrilled... everyone but the loser owner. The owner clashed with Ramsay and let his delusional ego about what a "great chef" he was interfere with listening to anything Ramsay would tell him. Some people just can't be helped.

Welcome

Hi! My name is Mark Graban. I started this blog to help document the construction of the two backyard wood-burning pizza ovens I've built over time. I also maintainit as a place to share links I've found on the topic. Both the pizza making and the blog are a hobby, I hope you find this useful.